The Nonprofit Incubator

III. Planning
Strategic Planning
Strategic Planning is an
organization's process of defining its
strategy, or direction, and making
decisions on allocating its resources to
pursue this strategy, including its capital
and people. Various business analysis
techniques can be used in strategic
planning, including:
1. SWOT analysis (Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities, and
Threats);
2. PEST analysis (Political,
Economic, Social, and
Technological);
3. STEER analysis (Socio-cultural,
Technological, Economic,
Ecological, and Regulatory
factors); and
4. EPISTEL (Environment, Political,
Informatic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal).
Strategic planning is the formal consideration of an organization's future course. All
strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:
1. "What do we do?"
2. "For whom do we do it?"
3. "How do we excel?"
In business strategic planning, some authors phrase the third question as "How can we
beat or avoid competition?". (Bradford and Duncan, page 1). But this approach is more
about defeating competitors than about excelling.
In many organizations, this is viewed as a process for determining where an
organization is going over the next year or - more typically - 3 to 5 years (long term),
although some extend their vision to 20 years.
Page 37 of 89